Sherrill Elizabeth Tekatsitsiakwa (Katsi) Cook is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe. She was born on the St. Regis Reservation in northern New York State, the youngest of the four children of Evelyn Kawennaien Mountour and William John Cook. Her mother was educated by Catholic nuns, and died when Cook was eleven years old; her father was a captain in the U.S. Marines and a World War II fighter pilot. Cook was delivered by her paternal grandmother who was also a midwife. Cook was educated at Catholic boarding schools, attended Skidmore College from 1970 to 1972, and then transferred into the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth College. Soon after, stirrings of the American Indian Movement (AIM) sparked a "generational call to consciousness" and she left school. She married Jose Eugenio Barreiro, a Cuban-born academic and indigenous activist, and the first of their five children was born in 1975. She and Barreiro worked with the Kanienkehaka Longhouse Council of Chiefs from 1972 to 1977 and from 1979 to 1983, where she helped write and produce Akwesasne Notes and toured the U.S. and Canada with the White Roots of Peace, a "communications group" that Cook describes as a traveling university through which participants learned Native knowledge and imparted it to others.

Cook took up midwifery in 1977, following the Loon Lake Conference of the Six Nations, where control of reproduction was designated as a prerequisite to Native American sovereignty. In 1978 she undertook a midwifery apprenticeship at The Farm in Tennessee, followed by clinical training as a women's health specialist at the University of New Mexico. Cook lived briefly in South Dakota, where in 1978 she attended the founding meeting of Women of All Red Nations (WARN), and in Minnesota, where she founded the Women's Dance Health Project in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Cook returned to Akwesasne in 1980, where she practiced midwifery, helped develop the Akwesasne Freedom School, and founded and directed the Women's Dance Health Program there. When concerns arose among women on the reservation about the safety of breastfeeding, Cook started the Mother's Milk Monitoring Project in 1984, to monitor PCB levels in breast milk and to address the environmental impact of industrial development of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project (begun in the 1950s). The Mother's Milk Project is still extant and provides services and advocacy for residents of Akwesasne (one of the most severely polluted Native American communities), among them inclusion in the Superfund Basic Research Program.

From 1994 to 1998, Cook was a Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Health and Toxicology at the University of Albany School of Public Health; as a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University's American Indian Program during those same years, she also worked on environmental justice issues within the Six Nations Iroquois communities. In 2001, she served as the Dr. T.J. Murray Visiting Scholar in Medical Humanities at Dalhousie University, and she has lectured on the subject of alternative and complementary therapies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) Medical School and at Cornell University. Cook has participated in national and international women's health movements, including service on the board of the National Women's Health Network and involvement in the Nestle boycott. She monitors indigenous rights in the drafting of midwifery legislation, is the founder of the Six Nations Birthing Center at Six Nations, Ontario, and has worked with Inuit women to restore the practice of midwifery to their communities.

For additional biographical information, see the book: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (ed. by Jael Silliman, et al.); and oral history of Katsi Cook in Voices of Feminism OH project.

The Katsi Cook Papers consist of information about Cook and her midwifery and women's health practice in the Akwesasne Mohawk community on the St. Regis Reservation in northern New York State (St. Regis straddles the U.S.-Canadian border), and about her involvement in the Mother's Milk Project, begun in 1984 to document and monitor levels of PCBs and other industrial pollutants in the St. Lawrence River. The drinking water on the reservation was contaminated, and Cook was instrumental in tracing the cause to PCBs. Documentation of Cook's environmental justice and Native American health activism is extensive, and includes writings, grant applications, surveys, reports, and statistical data, as well as articles, clippings, and publications about the detrimental effects of environmental pollutants on health. A small amount of data concerning advocacy for Native American education is also included.

[NOTE: The contents list for this collection is not online. Contact the Sophia Smith Collection if you would like one sent to you.]